Yeah, we got a sense of that in the demo.

If you could picture a mountain-pass. If you’ve got one key unit in a mountain pass and they come lumbering in-

Thermopylae.

Yeah, it’s 300 right there, yeah.

In the demo we saw the buying of tiles. Will that put too much emphasis on gold? Where you can just buy what you want and not worry about other aspects of the game?

Not really. Some things had to be glossed over in the demo because we had like 15 minutes. Gold can be accumulated obviously – we wanted to do more interesting things with gold. In the past there wasn’t a whole lot you could do with gold. Obviously you had some bribery and you could rush units. Land purchasing is expensive. It can be very expensive. It can be very expensive versus just buying an open plain next to your city that’s really close. So, it’s a viable strategy, but you’re not going to have any gold left to actually rush units or buy them outright, to bribe City-States, to bribe other civilizations, to buy luxury resources you need. Also, strategy resources are finite in the game. If you’ve got two iron, that means you’ve got two swordsman. No more. That’s all you get.

So, there’s a lot more buying and trading, horse-trading, for resources in the game. So, gold has a lot more value. If you spend it a lot or too much in one place, it’s just not available anywhere else.

Is espionage a part of the game?

Espionage is not a part of the full game. This is pretty much vanilla. John changed a lot in the game and we had to draw a line somewhere with what we were going to introduce to players.

Are there future plans that you’re able to talk about beyond this release in the fall?

There are lots of future plans I would love to talk about, but somebody would ahhh…

[laughing] Gotta ask.

Big trouble.

Well thanks for taking the time to talk to us and good luck as you work towards its release.

Thanks guys.

We'd like to thank Mr. Shirk for taking the time to speak to us. Civilization 5 hits stores September 21st.